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Finding, knowing and analyzing how severe it is: Survey Report
S'urvey Report 2017' Cell Phone Addiction in Dalian Maple Leaf International School International Relations 12 Baraka, Scarlet ,Viola, Zoe Introduction ' '''The topic of our survey is to figure out the seriousness of the issue of cell phone addiction among students in the Dalian Maple Leaf International School. It aims to raise students’ awareness about the issue and promote their participation in “self-treatment.” This survey will support our IR in Action Project as students themselves will be aware of their cell phone addiction while answering the questions, and thus, will then be encouraged to actively take actions, which is the ultimate goal of our project. '''Rationale' In our survey, we brainstormed questions that seem to be casual and unnoticed but reflect one’s habit and dependence on phones. Through these questions, we want to find out what contributes to cell phone addiction, why are people addicted and how can they relieve their symptoms through conscious self-treatment actions. For example, the first question we asked in our survey was, “which function in your phone consumes you the most time”? Knowing this, we would know where we should start from to help students successfully deal with cell phone addiction. The results may help us with the interactive activities that we would hold in Maple Leaf junior high. We also asked questions like whether the first and last thing one does a day is to check their cell phones. Questions like this are not often asked by people on a daily basis; they tend to ignore and overlook their issues. Through these questions, we aim to encourage our participants to become aware of the seriousness of cell phone addiction by themselves. Plus, in order to figure out the seriousness of social media addiction, one of the specific forms of cell phone addiction, we asked questions like whether “the first thing you do when you see beautiful scenery/tasty food/interesting events is taking out your cell phone.” We also want to find connections between cell phone addiction and social relationships, technologies and other psychological factors like stress and peer pressure. Methodology We conducted our survey by handing the physical copies out in classes. We decided not to sort the groups out by homerooms since certain home rooms like the ZhouenLai classes might have different opinions on cell phones and groups tend to influence individuals. We need this survey to be completely random. For the sampling technique, we decided to use the stratified random sample since it is both random and fair, and it best represents the school’s proportions, thus best reflects the true degree of cell phone addiction. One possible bias that might influence our research is after doing the survey and asking opinions from the participants, we realized that posting wechat moments almost has nothing to do with cell phone addiction. Many teachers and students do not have the habit of posting wechat moments frequently. A better question might be, what is the time span that you refresh your moments. Another factor that might bias the result of our survey is that we ignored the prankish nature of many students, especially male students. We asked whether the first and last thing one does a day is to check their phones, while some of the answers we got marked that the last thing they do was to take off their glasses or close their eyes. This suggests that some students might not answer their questions honestly. Also, because we had a smaller sample, the voice of some international students, like the two Pakistani and Kazakhstanis might be ignored. Results Question 1: which function in your phone consumes your day the most? This question reflects which function in phone consumes one’s day the most. As shown in the graph, entertainment and communications clearly takes the most time, and applies for true every group that we surveyed. For females, shopping and media also take a huge portion of time, which ranks the third and fourth amongst their consumptions. It seems that cell phones are rarely useful for actual productive things: reading and homework only takes 7% and 9% each. Question 2: How do you prefer to contact with others? The pie graph present students and teachers’ preference of the way of communication with others, which is, “face to face” or “through cell phones”. Generally, a majority of respondents lean towards the option of “face to face”, which takes up 70% in total. Among the ones who choose “cell phones” as the preferred way of contact, the number of female respondents slightly outweighs the number of male by 1 %. The internationals and BC teachers, however, shows a strong preference towards communicating face to face. This reveals that people’s habit of communicating does not vary by gender, grade, but likely by nationality. Question 3: The first thing you do after waking up is using your cell phone. Question 4: The last thing you do before sleeping is using your cell phone. The previous graphs for question 3 and 4 depict the respondents’ frequency in regards of the usage of cell phones. For the first statement “The first thing you do after you wake up is looking for your cell phone (question #3),” 47% of students and teachers choose “often”, followed by “rarely” with 25% and “always” with 22%. As for statement “The last thing you do before sleep is using your cell phone(#4),” similarly, most respondents state their frequency as “often” with 51% and ones who choose “always” takes up 33% of all, which is notably more than the ones of question#3. Question 5: You try to respond to your wechat messages as soon as your see them. For question#5, the majority of the students and teachers admit that they do respond to their wechat messages as soon as possible with frequency of “often” (64%) and “always”(16%) shown in the pie graph. In comparison with that, only 20% of total respondents states that they “rarely” or “never” respond to their wechat messages as soon as possible. Among this, BC teacher is the largest group that chooses “rarely” with 16%, while Chinese teacher takes up the biggest proportion (19%) in the option of “always”. Question 6: People's likes and comments to your moments matter to you. This question allows us to figure out the issue of social media addiction in our school. We found out that the tendency of social media addiction is somewhat related to the participants’ genders. Among students who chose a (strongly agree) and b (agree), female students account for almost 50% whereas male students only hold the portions of 27% and 41% respectively. Also, BC teachers show remarkably small portion in terms of this question, accounting for only 2% of each choice. This might be because BC teachers do not tend to spend much time on wechat, a foreign chatting app that most of them are not familiar with. Question 7: How often do you update your moments? Unlike Question 6 that displays a relatively close correlation between the tendency of social media addiction and the participants’ genders, Question 7 does not really reflect this correlation. While Question 6 well reflects it by directly asking whether people’s likes and comments to your moments “matter” to you, Question 7 merely asks about the participants’ frequency of updating their moments. It can be interpreted that simply updating moments does not necessarily mean a person has a symptom of social media addiction since he or she might not really care about what other people think about their moments; they might just enjoy the action of updating moments itself. Approximately 38% and 50% of female students chose a and b respectively. About 41% and 39% of male students chose a and b respectively. Question 8: You will feel upset and insecure when you are without your cell phone. This question was asked to figure out the participants’ dependency on their cell phones. Not surprisingly, about 64%, or more than half of them answered that they feel uncomfortable without their cell phones. However, teachers, especially BC teachers show relatively low dependency on their cell phones as only 1% and 3% chose a (strongly agree) and b (agree) respectively. Question 9: The first thing you do when you see beautiful scenery/tasty food/interesting events is taking out your cell phone. Similar to Questions 6 and 7, this question can be associated with the issue of social media addiction. Again, not surprisingly, majority of the participants replied that they tend to take out their cell phones when they see something unusual and special. The figures show that females are more likely to do this than males do as among the respondents who chose a (strongly agree), they account for 51% whereas male participants only account for 34%. ' ' Question 10: When you are eating with your friend, you naturally reach for your cell phone.' ' ' ' The opinions split almost equally between agreements (both strongly agree and “yes in most cases”) and disagreements (“not really” and “strongly disagree”) with 52% and 48% respectively, while agreements slightly outweighs by 4% in total. Similarly to question#5, in less than 25% of the disagreements, BC teachers and Chinese teacher shows distinguishable different opinions towards the given statement. BC teachers (21%) have the largest proportion in the option of “strongly disagree” while Chinese teachers consist of 18% of the “agrees”. It is also interesting to note that most of the international students disagree with the statement. Analysis ''' '''Before getting the results of the survey, we expected females to be more inclined with the cell phone addiction, internationals to be more addicted than Chinese and students’ addiction to be more severe than the teachers. Throughout this survey, we have concluded an interesting tendency that points out the distinction of each gender in using cell phone. According to these ten questions, especially the ones that ask for habits regarding social media and communications tools, females' addiction is more obvious. It is normal and important for girls to be eager to get the attention and care that they need, as they pay much more effort when preparing for the pictures they post. The constant urge to check their cell phones partially results in their addiction. For boys, their addiction is better revealed in their distribution of times of cell phone functions. Entertainment takes a lot of time for the boys, which proves their addiction. For both genders, distancing from their cell phones seems to be a major problem. More than half from either genders reports using cell phones as the first and last thing in their schedule, which best proves their addiction. We found out that a large number of Maple Leaf students and teachers have a high dependence on their cell phones and social needs have the major effect on it. Referred from question #1 and 2, it is evident that students and teachers mostly use their cell phones to communicate, although most of them prefer to contact with others face to face rather than using cell phones. Other than that, if we take questions #5 to 9 into account, the result reveals that there is a strong relationship between social needs and dependence on cell phones. In other words, social media, represented by moments and wechat in the survey, is a significant factor that bonds the respondents with their cell phones and has the potential of interrupting daily face-to-face communication between people, which is shown in the last question. These results we have got from our survey does not exhibit sufficient evidence which claims a great deal of crowds have the cell phone addiction issue in our school. We are not completely content with these results of survey, for we make few mistakes on some questions. The context of our questions is too narrow for different people who have various habit and lifestyle. Furthermore, we did not adequately put the same pre-condition for each survey, the results may vary amongst some questions which does not reflect the true conditions of cell phone addiction in our school. For example, for the BC teacher, posting moments is not applicable for many of them, failing to reflect their habits and possible addiction. Category:Survey Report